1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an agitator, an agitating method, and a melting furnace with an agitator.
2. Background Art
Conventionally, ingots serving as commercial products are made from a conductive melt of a metal, a nonferrous metal and other materials. The conductive melt is a melted conductive material of Fe, Al, Cu, Zn, Pb, Ti, Mg, or an alloy or composite of at least two of these materials. On such an occasion, in order to obtain ingots having uniform quality, it is necessary to fully agitate aluminum, etc. in the melting furnace. For this reason, a stirring rod is put into a melting furnace to manually agitate melted aluminum etc., or an electrically driven agitating system is provided below a furnace to agitate melted aluminum etc.
The aforementioned manual agitation should be performed at a very high temperature under harsh conditions. Accordingly, adverse effects on workers cannot be ignored. When the aforementioned electrically driven agitating system is used, it is necessary to effectively form a strong magnetic field which is required to perform the agitation. Accordingly, a large amount of electric power is required. Furthermore, in order to form a magnetic field, a coil is used, and the coil must be cooled in order to curb the oscillation thereof. The cooling process must be carefully performed, and the system for the cooling is complicated and requires a high cost. Since the entire system is very expensive, the employment thereof represents an investment. Accordingly, it is not possible to easily employ such a system.